The Fuccons: Meet The Fuccons

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All Rise...

Talk about your Ugly Americans! According to Judge Bill Gibron, the Japanese sure have one helluva axe to grind. How else could you explain this bizarre live-action comedy spoof about a Western family that's more freakish than funny?

The Charge

The nuclear family as seen by the transistor society.

The Case

The Fuccons have just arrived in Japan—Mom, Dad, and only son Mikey.
Adjusting to a new culture and all its idiosyncrasies is hard for the family,
especially when you consider how absolutely brainless they are. Dad is a dolt,
constantly inferring sex into everything the family does. Mom is a mindless
drone, whose ever-present perkiness is enough to drive Buddhists to suicide, and
Mikey…well, Mikey is a moronic priss who's so incredibly sissified that
pre-operative transsexuals point to him as the level of femininity they hope to
achieve post sex-reassignment surgery. Whether it's going to the store, drinking
his milk, fishing with his cousin, or discovering the joys of a personal tutor,
Mikey is as blank as a fart and twice as acrid. As these ugly Americans
ascertain the pleasures and pitfalls of their new homeland, we begin to notice
something odd about their wooden personalities. And then it hits
us—they're mannequins! Actual showroom dummies! Like some twisted
Twilight Zone tweaked out on crank, this tainted Tokyo treat seems to be
a slamdunk social satire on the notion of family, friendship, and acting the
fool, but the only real response one has after watching this feeble forced farce
is "Who in their right mind would ever want to Meet the
Fuccons?"

Remember that creepy plastic family that hawked Duracell batteries a while
back, the Puttermans? You know the ones. They were dressed like rejects from the
Andy Kaufman robot atrocity, Heartbeeps, moving through their
pseudo-sitcom shtick in a manner more sinister than salesmanship. Meet the
Fuccons is a lot like that advertising abomination, except it's even more
disquieting. How odd is this show? A snuff film featuring authentic cannibalism
and scenes of necrophilia would be less unsettling that this ulcerous
undertaking. While you may scoff at such a suggestion, take this into
consideration—with real death on screen, you know what you're getting.
There's no hidden message in human flesh eating, no underlying significance to
shagging a corpse. But with Meet the Fuccons, you're not quite sure what
you're getting into, starting with the name. Is it a play on a famous
four-letter word? Does it mean something even viler in the native Japanese? Like
the episode of Seinfeld where Elaine is convinced that the Asian staff of
her nail salon is secretly making fun of her, you can't help but feel that this
whole Fuccon freak show is some manner of metaphysical payback for everything
the West has ever done to the Far East, from colonialism to Iron Chef
America.

The whole premise is like a perverted Madison Avenue executive's most
horrendous wet dream. Using actual department store stiffs circa 1952, and
scripts that state their purpose in direct, demonstrative assertions, the
Fuccons play family as the rest of the planet pauses—and weeps—in
shame. They are so perfect, so flawlessly fake and emotionally empty that this
entire production could be a Tokyo interpretation of the life story of the Olsen
Twins. As they go about their mundane machinations, faces frozen in mock
happiness and delight, there is an escaped lunatic-like ideal to their
personalities. If they weren't so smarmy and gosh-darned good, they'd be
drinking the blood of infants in their spare time. Mom and Dad are perhaps the
most troubling. Like Mary Beth Hurt and Randy Quaid in that misunderstood Bob
Balaban classic, Parents, you're sure there is something not quite right
with this American Dream-drizzled duo. As a study of suppression, these freaky
Fuccons are pitch perfect, but if that is supposed to be funny, it fails. You'll
be cringing more than crying your daffy laffy tears. That just leaves Mikey as a
potential source of amusement. Sadly, he's so bag of hammers/box of hair/lump of
lard stupid that you want to pound his whiny, weird wooden face into some manner
of origami paper—and then fold that into something that's far more
friendly. He's a dopey, dreary, dimpled drip who turns even the most mundane of
chores—like visiting his grandparents or going to the store—into an
experiment in exasperation. Again, if this is a Japanese comment on how mentally
deficient and uneducated most American school kids are, Mikey is a massive
poster boy for the bubble-headed. He is perhaps the only entertainment entity
destined to be outsmarted by a skin tag. But he's still not funny.

What ADV has here, then, is a DVD sampler (full-series sets are coming,
supposedly) of a show that really is impossible to praise and yet is equally
impossible to ignore or put aside. It sure looks weird and plays out ever
stranger, but unless you are tuned into the Fuccons's fudged-up wavelength,
there is not a lot of lunacy to be found here. Many of the ancillary
characters—the '60s supermodel tutor, the obnoxious relative from America,
a potential girlfriend for Mikey—don't get enough airtime or backstory to
resonate fully. Indeed, since this is just a selection of some of the series
"best" offerings (there are eight three-minute episodes in total
here—"The Start of Our Life in Japan," "Mikey's
Cousin," "Mikey Goes Shopping," "Mikey and Milk,"
"Mikey and the Ghost," "The Lady Tutor," "Mikey's
Grandparents," and "Fly Mikey"), we aren't getting any of the
character development or conflict necessary to build up a good head of humor. If
this is all supposed to be irony via iconography, it fell flat on this
Westerner's wounded pride. If it's just supposed to be an expression of
stupidity for retardation's sake, it's never pure enough to get that placid
point across. Meet the Fuccons is probably destined to be a hugely
popular cult creation, something that individuals "in the know" seem
to get right off the bat. There will be those of us, though, who'll still stare
in disbelief at how something so studied could be so strange—and
stifling.

As for the technical specs of the disc, ADV delivers a fine, if rather
barebones, digital package. The sound and vision are fabulous—the image is
bright, clean and colorful in its 1.33:1 full frame transfer. The aural elements
are equally good. As a matter of fact, this critic found the English dub to be
far more enjoyable than the original Japanese language version (both are
available, with well-done subtitles). That may be because the American actors
are tweaking the material a bit, giving it an extra glint of goofy glee that the
Asian cast just can't emulate. As for extras, there are some screensavers (for
high-end TVs, one suspects) and some computer froufrou (icons, wallpaper) as
part of the DVD-Rom experience. One hopes that as the full sets arrive on the
scene, more information about the show will be presented. It is apparently
likened to The Simpsons back home, since it plays in between the segments
of a popular variety-style series, ala The Tracey Ullman Show. As it
stands now, Meet the Fuccons is neither hilarious nor horrible. Instead,
it occupies an unsettling plane somewhere between genius and germ warfare. It's
up to you to decide which side of the surreal you come down on.